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Recent events in the United States have brought home to the owners and hosts of social media platforms the need for some limits on what can be posted and the need to prevent dissemination of lies that can create violent attacks.

And so we have seen the extraordinary decision to bar the President of the United States, along with a host of others, permanently or temporarily from a wide range of the popular social media platforms.

Even in the United States, it appears, there are limits to free speech when this right is used to broadcast false and damaging lies.

Even before Donald Trump had his Twitter account suspended, and steps taken to stop replacement accounts opened, messages were being placed on many posts stating that the information being disseminated was inaccurate or wrong.

And similar warnings are now flowering on many other accounts of people with far smaller followings.

Tens of thousands of Twitter accounts, websites and pages on a range of social media platforms have now been closed and a number of platforms can no longer find an easy-access host or be downloaded on the two major mobile platforms.

This is fine, if you are an American. Many of these major global social platforms and their hosts are owned by American companies and have their headquarters in America. So they are starting to police their own backyard. And good for them.

But how far will they go for other people in other countries? If someone prominent in a fairly powerful medium-sized country started letting fly with false information would there be the same reaction? The cynical might say it could depend on how anti-American the falsehoods were, and they could well be right.

A lot of false information, some of it damaging, is peddled around the world and those affected cannot even get the “false information” label put on the posts and web pages, let alone have users restricted.

There is simply no vetting, as is being done in a way in the US for American news, and no way of even making a complaint that will be listened to. And by the time you get down to Zimbabwe, just how many people at Twitter or Facebook can find the country on a map, let alone know anything about us? And anyway, do they care?

So Zimbabwe is looking at other solutions. The main one is holding the posters and disseminators personally responsible for what they publish, and if they publish something false that the National Prosecuting Authority reckons could affect the nation, then they can face criminal charges under a statute law.

In other cases, where it is a personal attack using false information on a private person, it would seem that the civil remedy of a defamation suit for damages would be possible. Such suits have been launched, although none appears to have yet reached the top of the civil roll for the High Court.

A more serious problem arises when a public authority is defamed with a false fact. Civil suits are not usually possible in such cases.

There have been the odd prosecutions on criminal defamation, although only two in the entire legal history of Zimbabwe were pressed to a conclusion, and there have been statutory crimes defined over the years when there are security implications.

Our Constitution has a robust Declaration of Rights, and while the rights of freedom of movement and association can be limited for a range of good reasons that would be acceptable in any democratic society, such as the present lockdown to contain Covid-19, the restrictions of freedom of speech are far more limited.

But freedom of speech does not give immunity to taking personal responsibility for what you say, or what you write.

When it comes to opinion, then so long as the underlying facts are substantially true there are almost no limits, especially opinions that concern public matters and public figures.

It has long been established that a public figure needs a thick skin and has to take the rough with the smooth. But there is that rider that the underlying facts have to be substantially true.

The problem comes therefore with false facts. And we are now facing this. A group of people posted false remarks that said a policeman killed a baby with a baton.

They are now before the courts. While their defence has not been detailed, it appears likely that they will be arguing on points of law, whether these remarks meet the test in the statute, and perhaps on Constitutional grounds.

It is likely, considering the access that this group have to legal advice, that we will get a thorough exploration of the whole legal position.

It needs to be noted that while an individual police officer can be sued for wrongful actions, and can face disciplinary or criminal charges, a defamed police officer cannot sue over something concerning official duties.

And the police have to accept they will face robust criticism over anything that is not absolute perfection, but they are entitled to protection against lies.

Those of us in the mainstream media have always had, hanging over us, the legal requirement that we take personal responsibility for what we write or what we broadcast. It goes with the job. This is why editors and publishers take a great deal of time and trouble, and use a lot of manpower, to check facts.

Even then we get it wrong sometimes, but when we do, we all publish the correction. We do that to maintain credibility; a correction does not exempt us from responsibility, however, and we can still face civil or criminal action.

So it is possible to live with this responsibility in a free society and as some totally legal printed comment in some publications shows, Government actions can be severely criticised without problem. But facts must be true.

The same culture of personal responsibility does not seem to be part of the background of most on social media. They believe that they can publish anything, and many frequently do.

Regrettably many of their readers and hearers give the same credence, or even more as so many Americans have, to the social media lies as they give to factual media reports.

And that is the problem. In a country like the US, home of the platforms the people use, the culture of personal responsibility is starting to be enforced by the platforms, who flag false news, suspend repeat offenders and eventually close access, even if you are a President peddling lies. But what about the rest of us?

Sometimes lies are just funny, like what is peddled by the flat earth advocates. Sometimes they are hurtful, like some of the personal information spewed out by former friends and lovers. And sometimes they are dangerous, as even Americans now realise.

So somehow we have to enforce that culture of personal responsibility, basically when it comes to facts. That is our challenge, and we need to get it right. We can accept comment is free, can be robust and might even be unfair. But we have to make facts sacred.